Two weeks ago when I was at a chinese restaurant with my wife Kathy, I broke open my fortune cookie to find….no fortune.

Hah ha, we joked about it and that was that.

So tonight we were having chinese at home with our daughter Angela and Kat’s mom. When it came time to open the fortune cookies, Kat gave me one from the generous pile the restaurant had provided. As she was reaching for it, I said, with mock gravity, “if that one doesn’t have a fortune in it, I’m leaving town.”

Opened the cookie…no fortune. Of course, all the other cookies were normal.

That makes two fortuneless cookies (from different restaurants!) in less than a month after a lifetime of opening them and always finding perfectly normal, trivial fortunes inside. It’s like reading your horoscope in the newspaper every morning for grins, then seeing a warning not to fly the day you’re taking the Airbus to London–and yours is the only paper the warning appears in!

So it’s an omen…is it a good one or bad? Surely the universe has better things to do than telegraph a punch with fortune cookies. Right? So it must be a good omen. Oh boy, time to buy lotto tickets!